The media continued its adulation of Pope Francis by hailing his pronouncement that gays are OK as long as they’re chaste and unmarried. Fewer noted that, since all public positions of power and authority in the Church are held by clerics, Francis’ denial of ordination to women maintains their second-class status. No one remarked on the pope’s stating during the same press conference that “Masonic lobbies” are bad and the important insight this provides into Francis’ thinking
The pope was not referring to the Propaganda Due, or P2, secret society implicated in numerous crimes and the infamous Vatican Bank/Banco Ambrosiano scandal of the early 1980s.
Although the group had its origins in Freemasonry, by the 1970s it had become a clandestine association of Italy’s most powerful men in business, government, military, legal and media sectors and was no longer connected to worldwide Masonry. Some reports state high-ranking prelates were members; some said they weren’t members but had close personal and economic relationships to P2 members.
What Pope Francis meant by “Masonic lobbies” is a decades-old conspiracy theory advanced by rightwing Catholics that “behind every Democrat, every liberal, every progressive” are secretive and cunning Masons who want to destroy the Church and rule the world.
Vatican spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, alluded to this when he declared that reports questioning Bergoglio’s role during Argentina’s military dictatorship came from “anti-clerical leftwing elements that are used to attacking the Church.”
Pope Francis’ thoughts about “Masonic lobbies” can be inferred because first, based on the interview, he considers that they are a reality, that they are a malevolent influence and that they are important enough to mention. Secondly, Francis has ties to the ultraconservative Communion and Liberation, one of the global Catholic movements which want to “return the Roman Catholic Church to its traditional role of political power." Those who base their political and cultural ideas on “human values” rather than a belief in Jesus Christ “are considered ‘enemies of CL.’”
Bergoglio thought highly enough of CL's founder, Fr. Luigi Giussani, that “he distributed his books at literary fairs in Argentina.” In the judgment of “a very close collaborator with Giussani,” CL bishop, Luigi Negri, “there is no question that [Masonic] values designed and conceived within a rationalistic Enlightenment mentality” are “an enemy of the Church.” Not only do Masons want the “destruction of the Church and Christian Civilization,” but also “its replacement with a culture and a society that is substantially atheistic.”
(emphasis mine)
Per Negri: “Freemasonry has certainly found its strength in secrecy, in the ability to identify and assimilate the leadership of men who are unconditionally obedient to its directives, as well as its ability to influence ever-wider strata of the culture and leadership of civic and institutional life.”
…..Furthermore, “not only has Freemasonry conquered the revolutionary avant-garde in Europe and in the world but, above all, it has strongly conditioned the regimes that, arising from these Masonic-liberal revolutions, would result in the great totalitarian systems.”
….The CL bishop gives voice to the belief, strongly rooted in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, of a greater “identity-orientation” - certainly a very serious and disturbing presence, now widely documented - of many Freemasons with positions of responsibility in the great totalitarian systems.
….To deal with the still-tangled knot of the more or less hidden relations between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the Freemasons, we must go back to the relationship between the Church and modernity. “It is not the Church that is anti-modern, but modernity that is anti-Church,” says Bishop Negri.
This is the “Masonic lobbies” to which Francis refers: prelates who secretly embrace the ideals of Freemasonry as defined by rightwing Catholics and are a threat to the Church.
Every prelate pays close attention to the pope’s pronouncements. Does Francis' remarks set the stage for curial factions accusing their enemies of being Masons in order gain his attention? I suppose somewhere in every cleric’s past there has been some remark or notation which sounds suspiciously like the ideals of the Enlightenment or modernity.
Worse yet, will members of the Roman curia and global hierarchy fail to express any “Democratic, liberal, or progressive” point of view to the pope for fear that it will brand them as a Masonic conspirator?